Mapping URL "names" to Controllers in JSPs - spring

Question

I'm wondering if there is a way in Spring MVC to map "url names" to URLS. For instance:
list_users -> /admin/users/list
edit_user?id=123 -> /admin/users/edit/123 (or /users/edit?id=123)
list_programs -> /admin/programs/list
I come from a PHP background(specifically Symfony), where each URL/action has a "route name", with which you can create URLs in your view templates. In Symfony, you would do something like this in your template:
{{ path('user_edit', { 'id' : 123} }}
//output = /admin/users/edit/123
URLs do not necessarily need to be RESTful, but I'm just wondering if something like this could be accomplished with Spring MVC.
Possible Solution that I've thought about:
Keeping urls listed in a properties/messages file, like:
url.users.edit=/admin/users/edit/{id}
url.users.list=/admin/users/list
and then using <spring:message code="url.users.list" /> or something like this to generate the URLs. Is this already a generally accepted solution? Is this perhaps bad practice?
The reason I'm asking, is it seems like bad practice to have full URLs spread out throughout JSPs. What happens if 25 URLs are under an "/admin" sub-directory, and I want to move them to a different sub-directory, say "/backend".
Forgive me if there is a duplicate post somewhere on this, or if there is a simple solution that I'm overlooking, but it is a hard topic find a specific answer for.
Thanks!

Answer 1

In case anyone runs into this post, I have found a solution for mapping names to URLs for Spring MVC:
https://github.com/resthub/springmvc-router
This solution gets the job done quite nicely, and I especially like the fact that all of your URLs / routes are able to be kept in a central location. This implementation renders the #RequestMapping annotation useless.
Please keep the following in mind:
Make sure your dispatcher servlet uses * as the URL parameter. Took me awhile to figure out that / alone will not work, and will cause URLs to be generated incorrectly.
<servlet-mapping>
<servlet-name>spring-dispatcher</servlet-name>
<url-pattern>/*</url-pattern>
</servlet-mapping>